Are you still going to search engine home pages? Why? You can search straight from the address box. Configure the search engine used for better results or increased privacy in Chrome.
Some people might say that the words ‘privacy’ and ‘Chrome’ don’t belong in the same sentence, but there are things you can do to increase privacy when using Google’s web browser, like switching search engines. DuckDuckGo offers more privacy when searching the web and it does not track you to the same degree as Google does. It is possible to replace the default search in Chrome with DuckDuckGo quite easily.
Of course, you can simply type duckduckgo.com into Chrome’s address box to use the search engine, but there is a better and more convenient way to use it.
Type a word or phrase into Chrome’s address box and press Enter. Search results appear as if you had typed in the search at the home page. There is never any need to go to a search engine home page these days and searches can be performed from the address box instead. If you have not tried this, type it, it saves time and effort.
The search is performed at Google and Google results appear. How do we search DuckDuckGo instead when typing searches into Chrome’s address box?
Set Chrome’s default search
- Go to the menu in Chrome and click Settings
- Scroll down to the Search engine section
- Select the search engine to use
In this example, the choice is between Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask Jeeves. There is no option to choose DuckDuckGo. Don’t worry, we will add it.
Click Manage search engines.
Manage Chrome search engines
Lots of search engines are listed and there is a small section at the top and a long list below. The top items are what appear in the previous menu and are the default search engines. We will look at the Other search engines later.
Click the Add button on the right.
Add a search engine to Chrome
Adding a search engine is easy and you just have to enter the name in the Search engine box, then a word in the Keyword box. The Keyword is a like an abbreviation like duck, ddg (DuckDuckGo), or just d will do. Duck is used in the example above.
When you search for something at DuckDuckGo, the URL always begine https://duckduckgo.com/?q= followed by the search word(s). This is entered into the URL box above as https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s where %s is used in place of the query.
Click Save.
Search at DuckDuckGo
We are now ready to search DuckDuckGo, so quit settings and type ‘duck’ followed by a space. This is immediately replaced by Search DuckDuckGo and you can then enter the search phrase. Press Enter to search and the results come from DuckDuckGo instead of Google.
Change Chrome default search
- Return to Settings > Manage search engines and find DuckDuckGo
- Click the three dots on the right and select Make default in the menu
Search DuckDuckGo by default
Previously we had to type ‘duck’ followed by a space to search with DuckDuckGo, but now it is the default, so go ahead and type a word or phrase to search for. The icon shows the search engine and confirms that DuckDuckGo is being used.
Now your searches are more private by default. If you want to search with Google, Bing or another search engine, you can still go to their home pages and type in the search term.
Quicker and easier searches
As you browse the web you may have noticed that many websites have a search facility. Whenever Chrome detects a search box on a web page, it automatically adds it to its search engines list. It isn’t obvious that it is doing this or why it is doing it. However, it is actually a powerful feature that you can make use of, but it does require a tweak or two to make it perfect.
For example, go to YouTube and there is a search box at the top of the page, go to Wikipedia and there is a search page, and so on.
To see these search engines, go to Chrome’s menu button and select Settings. In the Search section, click Manage search engines. This displays a list of search engines Chrome has remembered. So what?
As we saw with DuckDuckGo, we can assign a shortcut to a website’s search facility and we use ‘duck’ for DuckDuckGo.
Find a search engine, such as YouTube, click the menu button on the right and select Edit. Enter Y for the Keyword. You could call it anything you want, but Y is easy to remember and we only have to type one letter. Save it and close the settings tab.
We can now search YouTube directly from the address box.
To use YouTube search from anywhere on the web, just type Y followed by a space in the address box. Notice that the address box now says Search YouTube Video Search: Just enter a word or phrase to search YouTube for. The search results are straight from YouTube.
You can rename other search engines and Wikipedia is probably in the search engine list. If you have never been there before, just go to wikipedia.org and Google will automatically add the search engine. Return to the search engine list, find Wikipedia and if it doesn’t already say so, rename it w.
Return to Chrome and type w followed by a space – it says Search Wikipedia (en): and you can type the word or phrase to search for.
It is hard to remember more than a few single letter search engines, so you might have to give some of them proper names.
There are dozens of search engines in the list and some you may never need, but giving your favourite and most used websites easy to remember names makes it possible to search them without even going there. Rename imdb.com to imdb and so on, then search it without first going to the site, and there are many more.
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